BlizzCon Virtual Ticket

Blizzard

BlizzCon 2014 Virtual Ticket

The Virtual Ticket lets you be a part of the biggest Blizzard universe mash-up this side of Heroes of the Storm—right from the comfort and convenience of your own home. The Virtual Ticket provides access to two days of live HD BlizzCon coverage across two streaming online channels, along with on-demand replays and DVR functionality so you can catch any of the action you might have missed. Here’s what you get:

Developer Panels & Exclusive Interviews

Get the latest news and developments on World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm, straight from the people who make ’em. The Virtual Ticket gets you access to all of the panels on the Main and Panel stages, along with in-depth interviews you won’t see anywhere else.

Live Contests—Hosted by Chris Hardwick

Bear witness to the full creative force of the Blizzard community in the Costume and Talent contests, held live onstage Friday night. Guiding us through this year’s evening of inspired insanity will be comedian Chris Hardwick (@nerdist), host of shows like Comedy Central’s @midnight and AMC’s Talking Dead, and overmind of Nerdist Industries—home base for a horde of geek-minded podcasts and other multimedia pursuits.

Closing Ceremony

The Virtual Ticket also gets you a front-row seat to the epic closing ceremony on Saturday night. Acts like The Offspring, Ozzy Osbourne, Foo Fighters, Tenacious D, and Blink-182 have closed out BlizzCons past—we’ll unveil our plans for this year’s finale closer to the show.

Bonus: Epic In-Game Goodies

Every BlizzCon, attendees and Virtual Ticket holders receive a treasure trove of commemorative in-game loot to mark the occasion. This year, the development teams are crafting goodies for World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm—but that’s all we’re going to say about that for now. . . .

You’ll also get early access to a limited-time online BlizzCon merchandise sale featuring a selection of commemorative items that will be available for purchase at the show.* This special sale for BlizzCon attendees and Virtual Ticket holders is scheduled to take place from October 17 through November 11, and will be followed by a public sale offering a more limited selection of items. We’ll have more details on the sale in the coming weeks.

Even if you don’t purchase a Virtual Ticket, you’ll still be able to catch plenty of BlizzCon action free online. Coverage of the BlizzCon opening ceremony and this year’s BlizzCon eSports tournaments—including the StarCraft II World Championship Series Global Finals, World of Warcraft Arena World Championship, Hearthstone World Championship, and Heroes of the Storm exhibition matches—will be streamed free in HD at www.blizzcon.com. The StarCraft II finals will also be available to watch at the official WCS website.

For more information on the Virtual Ticket, check out the Virtual Ticket page or click the Frequently Asked Questions tab above to read the FAQ.

*While supplies last. All orders placed in the online BlizzCon merchandise sale will be shipped from the United States; international shipping rates may apply.

Level 3 Garrison Blueprints Account-Wide

For our complete set of Garrison resources and guides; from basics to buildings, followers to missions, and much more, check out our Garrison Hub!

Speaking of Garrisons, it has been confirmed that level 3 blueprint achievements will be account wide. For example, once you unlock the blueprint for Mage Tower / Spirit Lodge Level 3, a reward from Finding Your Waystones, all of your characters can purchase that blueprint and open multiple portals around Draenor!

Valnoth

All level 3 blueprint achievements will be account wide. Once you have unlocked a level 3 you will be able to purchase the blueprint on your other characters.

Beta Class Feedback

Celestalon

Hey all. I've briefly mentioned this in tweets, but wanted to provide some more concrete info here for you. In an upcoming build, we're making some major changes to tanks.

But don't freak out, tanks, this is for the better. It'd be very easy to see datamining of these changes and think the sky is falling; don't be deceived! If you do the classic "scroll to my class, read datamined changes to my class only", you'll be sad and angry. And I'll be sad that you're sad and angry.

The core issue that we're aiming to solve is with the power level of tanks' defensive abilities. And I don't mean their gameplay. Their gameplay is great, especially Active Mitigation; that's not changing. I mean their total defensive effectiveness. Health, damage reduction (flat, percentage, random avoidance, etc), passive and active, cooldowns, etc.

Tanks have gotten a lot of power creep. A tanking specialized character should be better at tanking than a non-tanking specialized character, obviously. But by how much? 3x? 5x? 10x? It's gotten to be more like 50x or even 100x. Fun fact as a point of comparison: Most of the Mythic raid bosses (first raid tier) we've been testing deal tank damage roughly equivalent to what Heroic Lei Shen (second raid tier) did, after accounting for the squish and level difference. Some even more.

So, what are we doing about it? We're effectively doing a squish to tanks defensive effectiveness, and to dungeon and raid mob damage to tanks. This list is going to sound like a big pile of nerfs, but it's important to understand that it's not. It's happening to *all* tanks, and mob damage is coming down as well, to compensate.

Additionally, before anyone points it out, yes, some of these changes affect the defensive effectiveness of non-tanks. We didn't forget that; this was done consciously, because we think these changes should be made anyway, or we're considering other changes to compensate them if necessary.

Here's a summary of the actual changes (please post this around, and discuss this, not the datamining which will paint a very skewed and incomplete picture):

Creature damage has been retuned. In particular, the damage of creatures intended to be tanked in dungeons and raids has been drastically reduced to offset the below changes.

The amount of Armor on Plate, Mail, Shields has been reduced significantly.

Many tank abilities that increase maximum health have been reduced in effectiveness: Guarded by the Light, Stance of the Sturdy Ox, Bear Form, Empowered Bear Form, Blood Presence, Veteran of the Third War, Shadow of Death (Enhanced Death Coil), Ursa Major. In most cases, the magnitudes of these effects have been reduced.

Many tank abilities that passively reduce damage taken in some way have been reduced in effectiveness: Unwavering Sentinel, Improved Defensive Stance, Mastery: Critical Block, Defensive Stance, Sanctuary, Guarded by the Light, Stance of the Sturdy Ox, Bear Form, Blood Presence, Primal Fury. In most cases, the magnitudes of these effects have been reduced.

Many tank abilities that provide Active Mitigation have been reduced in effectiveness: Shield Block, Shield Barrier, Shield of the Righteous, Mastery: Divine Bulwark, Bastion of Glory, Guard, Stance of the Sturdy Ox, Shuffle, Savage Defense, Pulverize, Frenzied Regeneration, Tooth and Claw, Death Strike, Rune Tap. In most cases, the frequencies or magnitudes of these effects have been reduced.

Resolve has been changed to no longer scale with Stamina, only incoming damage over the last 10 sec, and its scaling rate changed. Resolve % = 100 * MAX(0, 8.5 * (1 - e^(-0.045*DamageMod)) - 1)

DamageMod refers to the % of a basic equal-level creature attacking you that you've had directed at you over the last 10 sec.

EDIT: See Post #40 on Page 2.

We understand that these changes will sound scary, but ask that you keep an open mind and try to comprehend the complete picture. Tuning may be pretty rough for a few builds as we iterate on these changes, so please be patient.

I'll try to answer questions as I have time, but please understand that we're all extremely busy trying to finish and polish things over here, so time is limited.

Thanks, everyone!

EDIT 1: Moved Bristling Fur to the Cooldowns category, had accidentally miscategorized it.EDIT 2: Fixed another typo.EDIT 3: Clarified that "Shadow of Death" is the buff from the Enhanced Death Coil perk.

Celestalon

Want to try to respond primarily to Geodew's summary of other feedback. These are just randomly scattered responses, as I don't have time to do a line-by-line response, but figure this is better than nothing.

General response: You make some very fine points in here, but there's also a lot of bias. These responses below are primarily pointing out the places where we disagree, but there are many places in here that we agree with as well. Apologies if this comes off overly negative/dismissive; not my intention.

Intro) Remember that dissatisfied players are way way more likely to post about it. Mistweavers definitely did get some massive changes. In fact you just made a gigantic post about all of these changes.

1) Revival isn't underpowered (at least not by the giant amount you're talking about). Healing Tide Totem, which you're comparing to, is very overpowered. Tranq and DH are channeled and delayed. HTT is instant and delayed. Revival is instant and immediate, so absolutely should do the least net healing. The problem is that HTT was doing healing comparable to Tranq/DH, which is being fixed.

Fistweaving tuning is fairly far off right now, so its utility is hard for you to judge.

2) Renewing Mist is *partially* uncontrollable. The vast majority of it is effective. All of the math you did on chances for Uplift to hit injured targets is great, except that it assumes the ReMs and the damaged targets are randomly distributed.

ReM will be *extremely* worth it to cast on its own merits. I'm fairly certain that it is already.

Managing that partially uncontrollable healing to still produce solid results is a key tenant of Mistweaver healing style.

3) That's how Haste works for healers; not as much throughput (due to mana) as crit/multistrike, but it's reliable and getting that heal to your target faster is of intangible but high value.

4) This is a great example of psychological impacts of tuning in game design. Because Mastery has been weak in the past, it has to be overpowered before some people will like it. We're not planning to do that. No, it is not tuned around expecting your raiders to go out of their way to take advantage of it; that's just a strawman. Everything we're seeing from actual data indicates that it is effective. Only a small fraction of it ever gets truly wasted now, and that's offset by the fact that does less overhealing than average.

5) No, Crane Stance is not 'intended to be useless' in Mythic. That's silly. The tuning is off on it, and we'll fix it.

6) Chi Brew usable while casting/channeling seems reasonable.

7) What you're saying is accurate, but we don't expect that it will cause a problem for now.

8) Xuen is just undertuned, it sounds like.

9) That sounds like just how raiding leans towards AoE healing on average. Zen Sphere in particular we feel is just undertuned, and plan to increase it significantly.

10) We're not seeing that from our testing.

11) Yeah, we do see this, and it does violate a rule we generally have with talent design. Since it's an extremely fun combo, and the row it forces a choice in isn't a throughput row, and it's been this way forever, we're going to let it slide for now.

12) It isn't really PBAoE; you can place it wherever you want. It's a tight-AoE healing CD, which we do see as useful to a Mistweaver in some cases.

Conclusion) Mistweaving is a very different healing style from other healers. It isn't the best fit for everyone, and that's fine (even good). I think the biggest difference is the indirectness. That may not suit you, and may suit others.

Comment by Lupin3rd

Comment by Mattizilla

I think you might've forgotten to link the "new gadgets"! There's nothing there but the pictures. A bit.. mysterious!

Comment by armstrongdanield

on Thu, 04 Sep 2014 15:39:29 -0500

I'm glad it's easy to gear for off-spec, so I can get my pally back into the tank game. I'd love to try out these new changes, cuz I came up from 1-90 as a Protection Paladin. I only changed to Ret cuz it was simpler.

Comment by Morahd

on Thu, 04 Sep 2014 15:39:31 -0500

I think its obvious at this point that Celestalon doesn't give a damn about mistweavers. His responses to most of the questions regarding the spec are either 1)Tuning will fix it 2)Mechanics work fine #dealwithit 3)Mastery isn't worthless

Comment by perculia

on Thu, 04 Sep 2014 15:39:34 -0500

Added it in! Was nearly done writing it up when the Virtual Ticket news hit.

Comment by WoWWarlock

on Thu, 04 Sep 2014 16:21:50 -0500

I just hope we can craft the goggles as soon as we can wear them... For MOP, I was level 90 before I could finally craft the goggles and by then I didn't even need them anymore. I made them for transmog. Very disappointing.

In previous Xpacs I was able to create the goggles as soon as I could wear them. That's how it should be.

Comment by perculia

on Thu, 04 Sep 2014 16:28:30 -0500

They require Engineering 600 to equip--so all you should really need to do is do enough daily cooldowns to obtain enough currency for the recipe, and accumulate enough materials from garrison Work Orders.

Comment by darkside1311

Comment by perculia

on Thu, 04 Sep 2014 16:45:18 -0500

Yeah, I tried that out on the beta (and it's mentioned in the lengthier linked guide). I was able to temporarily upgrade them to 665, however, something was buggy as they'd periodically go back down to 640. Did not notice any model changes when upgrading.

Comment by tarc

on Thu, 04 Sep 2014 16:47:15 -0500

They should bring back helm enchants and give it to engineers to craft.

Comment by Eggroll

on Thu, 04 Sep 2014 16:54:27 -0500

Nooo, what happened to Jay Mohr... and Kat Hunter :(

Comment by mstieler

on Thu, 04 Sep 2014 16:55:00 -0500

I just hope we can craft the goggles as soon as we can wear them... For MOP, I was level 90 before I could finally craft the goggles and by then I didn't even need them anymore. I made them for transmog. Very disappointing.

In previous Xpacs I was able to create the goggles as soon as I could wear them. That's how it should be.

It's looking like the goggles each take 60x Gearspring Parts Gearspring Parts, which are rewarded from Engineering Work Orders from the Engineering Works (small-size Garrison Plot), and additionally crafting via Engineering Gearspring Parts using 10x True Iron Ore True Iron Ore & 10x Blackrock Ore Blackrock Ore, so likely early enough on that you'll be able to get your gear on nice and fast :D

Comment by Ludidudi

on Thu, 04 Sep 2014 17:28:59 -0500

I dont understand this Blizzard.They are giving every expansion new engi googles and never for the last lvl.Its always midle levels and we can never rly use it except for transmog.Why is that?:(